Motorsports

PANOZ POWERHOUSE

by Larry Roberts

May 01, 1998

If you are a sports car racing fan and you've been in a coma for the
past couple of years, you probably don't recognize the name Don Panoz so
we will fill you in. As you might recall, when you went to sleep
professional sports car racing (fast, powerful two-seater purpose-built
racers as opposed to street machines like the Corvette or the Mazda
Miata) as a sport was in disarray. The International Motor Sports
Association (IMSA) was going down the tubes and the pro side of the
Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) was all but moribund.

It would take several weeks to explain the whole tragic/comic
political and financial shenanigans that have taken place since then.
Instead I'll skip them and go on to the man who may be able to bring
order out of this chaotic mess. His name is Don Panoz.

Panoz is a self-made multi-millionaire who got his start in life in
1960 when he used his Army mustering out pay (plus a few bucks he'd
earned acting as an agent to ship the cars owned by other GIs back home)
to buy a drug store in Pittsburgh and in short order, bought another.

From there, Panoz developed Maylan Laboratories to make
pharmaceutical products like pills, capsules, ect. Obviously, he had
acquired considerable experience and contacts in the business.

Rather than have this turn into an aggrandizement of Don Panoz,
we'll skip ahead to the current era by which time he has become a very
rich guy with lots of money to spend on new hobbies, one being an auto
building enterprise with his son Danny. What seems to have started out
as the high-class $55,000 Ford-powered "retrorod" Panoz sports car, has
now developed into a sports-racer (actually an international Grand
Touring Class 1 racer) that is now doing battle in endurance races at
tracks like Le Mans, Oschersleben, Daytona Beach and Sebring. And the
team that's campaigning the Panoz GT-1 cars is - you guessed it - Panoz
Motorsports. All this less than six months after he decided to upgrade
his son's hot-rod lookalike into an exotic but more streetable
two-seater coupe.

Along the way, the Panoz racing team (but not the manufacturing
organization} acquired Visteon (a Ford-owned auto parts company) as a
partner, making the team officially the Visteon Panoz Racing Team.

Early on in his involvement with professional big-time sports car
racing, Panoz realized that to make the sport a paying, spectator-
oriented proposition, the two at-odds organizations that were running
conflicting events, would have to be brought together. To make sure that
his Panoz racers would have race dates and tracks to run on, he simply
bought up a bunch of those tracks. In short order Panoz Motorsports
owned the venerable Road Atlanta track, Sebring International Raceway
and Mosport Park in Canada. Since these are three of the tracks that the
USRRC (a name resurrected by the SCCA) and the PSCR (Professional Sports
Car Racing - the successor to IMSA) race on, Panoz holds a decisive hand
in who races where.

And being a team owner, he pretty much represents all the
competitors who agree that there's only room for one organization to
hold big-time sports car endurance races in North America. Those races
have to be prestigious enough to attract corporate sponsorship for the
teams since sponsorship money is the key to any professional form of
racing today. Without it, teams wither up and blow away and the drivers
are forced to get day jobs.

Late in April, Don Panoz held a " ...and you'd better show up.."
meeting for the warring factions at his swanky resort in Brazelton,
Georgia. He stated that "..our mission (here) is to find a way to
advance sports car racing in the United States." And being who he is,
Don Panoz is just the guy who could force the amalgamation. Rumor has it
that he's even considering the purchase of the PSCR for himself and
maybe even the USRRC branch of the SCCA. And if that happens, the whole
ball game is his.

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